1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information reception and delivery system, and more particularly, to an information reception and delivery system which
receives and delivers information on the basis of contents of the information in a consolidated manner; PA1 displays on a display screen of a client terminal which performs ordinary tasks, such as word processing jobs, business information having a determined degree of necessity or openness such as outside or in-house information; and PA1 delivers to and displays on the client terminal business information which is provided from outside or within a company and which includes a plurality of content items.
2. Background Art
In association with recent development of a computer network, various types of public information are received and delivered across individual users such as corporations or persons by way of the computer network. For example, ordinary individuals can read newspaper stories delivered from a newspaper company over the computer network. In another case, a certain corporation opens its own information as public information to which everybody can freely gain access over the Internet.
In contrast, a corporation connects together its branch offices, sales offices, factories, and laboratories over a computer network in the form of an intranet. In general, the corporation has a necessity to manage its in-house information and owns a large number of terminals. For these reasons, the corporation usually employs a treelike connection instead of direct mutual interconnection among terminals of its employees. For instance, an employee can receive or deliver necessary information by making access to a host computer (a higher-level server) installed in the head office, through use of his terminal and by way of a host computer (a lower-level server) installed in his sales office.
In establishing an intranet (or a network designed for exclusive use of a corporation or a private network), the intranet is usually mutually connected to external networks such as the Internet (or a global network). Such a connection is considered to be inevitable for reasons of returns on investments, business, management, etc. In fact, such a configuration is adopted for establishing a network. Accordingly, various types of information can be received by a terminal of the corporation by making access to, e.g., the Internet, whereas various types of information can be delivered from the terminal over the Internet.
As mentioned above, so long as a necessary password and the like are obtained, various types of information can be substantially freely received by or delivered from every terminal by means of connection among the networks. However, such a high degree of convenience of the network adversely poses various problems.
For example, it is conceivable that information whose content items are irrelevant to the business of the corporation will be received by an employee making access to the external network from a terminal located in the corporation. More specifically, a certain employee receives personally-interesting information, e.g., information about gambling, and personally uses the thus-gained information.
It is also conceivable that, because of the high degree of convenience of the network, an excessive amount of information delivered or received over the intranet buries primarily essential information. In short, information is not reliably transmitted to the employees who use terminals, because of lack of indiscrimination with regard to content items of information, among information required to be necessarily transmitted to every terminal, information which should not be delivered to every terminal, information which does not have to be transmitted to every terminal, and the like.
For this reason, the intranet is required to control received information or information to be delivered according to its content items. Further, it is necessary to handle in a consolidated manner information which should be received and delivered within the intranet (e.g., in-house information) and information which are received from or delivered to the outside of the network while discriminating these information items from one another.
There has already been practiced displaying on a client terminal business information received and delivered by servers; i.e., external information such as newspaper stories and a weather forecast and in-house information such as notices and news from a secretariat. However, the employees cannot know in real time the business information received from the server while performing tasks such as word processing jobs. Content items of business information of this type received from servers are updated and change with elapse of time. However, when the user is performing a routine work, such as word processing operation, the user cannot display the contents of changing information. In order to display such business information, a conventional network requires the user to temporarily interrupt his routine work now being performed, such as word processing operations, and to switch the screen to an at-a-glance list of headlines of information, which has been received and delivered, or to a screen on which the details therefore are displayed. Obviously, such an action renders work inefficient.
Business information including a lot of content items are conventionally provided in unique format or style from outside the corporation or from within the corporation. Therefore, such business information cannot be displayed on the client terminal in a consolidated form of presentation. For example, news stories received from newspaper company A and newspaper company B may be identical with each other in terms of news content items. However, these news stories are not displayed in the same number of characters per line or in the same number of lines per page.
The content items of news and material incorporated therein are integrally managed. With regard to material sources stored in the server, the main body of material is accessed by identification of a file name on the basis of a news headline (i.e., a title or abstract) and a management table which includes file names regarding the main body of material in the form of a table. In this way, the news content items cannot be readily accessed.
An object of the present invention is to provide an information reception and delivery system which receives or delivers information in a consolidated manner on the basis of the content items of the information.
Another object of the present invention is to provide an information reception and delivery system which receives and delivers information in a consolidated manner on the basis of the content items of the information while discriminating information produced and delivered within an intranet and information received from an external network.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide an information reception and delivery system which receives and delivers the information produced within the intranet on the basis of the content items of the information.
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide means which allows the user to be aware of real-time business information received and delivered by way of servers, such as external information or in-house information, while continually performing his routine work, as well as to perform switching to displaying details of the business information on a client terminal and to receiving the information, as required, through use of display mode switch control means.
A further object of the present invention is to enable the display mode switch control means to readily and arbitrarily perform switching according to the way in which a terminal user uses the terminal.
A still further object of the present invention is to allow the user to arbitrarily switch the form of presentation of the business information according to his preferences in response to the switching action of the display mode switch control means.
A yet further object of the present invention is to make it easy for the user to customize the business information displayed on the client terminal according to his preferences on the basis of an information management table in which setting is made as to whether or not information is displayed for each display mode according to the degree of necessity or openness, as well as to allow the user to receive desired information solely by selecting the information on the screen.
A still further object of the present invention is to provide a client terminal with material sources stored in a server while their presentation forms are converted when business information--which contains a lot of business content items and which is supplied from outside the corporation or from within the corporation--is delivered to and displayed on the client terminal, as well as to perform conversion of the presentation forms in a consolidated manner common among the plurality of content items.
A yet further object of the present invention is to allow the user to display on a client terminal information which is customized for him according to the degree of necessity or openness by providing the system with a contents management table, as well as to make it easy for the user to prepare such a contents management table by providing an original contents list table in a shared manner.
A still further object of the present invention is to simplify a data structure and a system structure by managing content items and material included therein through use of different management tables.
An additional object of the present invention is to decentralize a time to deliver material from a server to client terminals by setting an extent of time in order to prevent material from being delivered at too high a volume at a specific time.